Looking Through Windows
by FaithDaria
Summary: Sam Winchester had turned his back on his father's world, but now something has taken his son and he'll do anything to get it back. Including calling his brother.


Title: Looking Through Windows

Rating: PG-13

Pairing: Background Dean/Lisa and Sam/Jess

Summary: Sam Winchester had turned his back on his father's world, but now something has taken his son and he'll do anything to get it back. Including calling his brother.

Sam had always been a light sleeper, mostly because of his upbringing. It was just as much Dean as his father when it came time to place blame for that little quirk; Dean had loved to start up prank wars, usually with a beginning round of putting Sam's hand in a bowl of warm water while he slept. It paid to stay aware of your surroundings. Even four years at college hadn't taken the edge off of that ability.

There was a slight scraping sound as the window moved up the sash. All the windows in the place were stiff, something that Sam liked, since it meant they made noise when someone tried to open them. Then, just as Sam was opening his eyes, he heard a muffled thump that could only be made by something or someone dropping onto the floor.

He didn't spare a thought to wonder who in the world would be breaking into the apartment of two mostly broke college students. There had been three break-ins over the last month or so in the area, one committed by a couple of drunk frat boys and the other two done in what Sam could identify as a professional manner by reading between the lines. There wasn't much worth stealing in their apartment, but Sam wasn't about to just stay in bed and let anyone rifle through his meager possessions. He grabbed the baseball bat he kept on the floor next to his bed, not wanting to risk the exposure and questions that the gun hidden behind the bed frame would bring.

The apartment was quiet and dark. Whoever it was, they were being stealthy about it. The only things in the apartment really worth stealing were their laptops and both of them were tucked away in the bedroom. He had no intention of letting this thief get that far.

The living room was empty, though the window was still open and the cold autumn air was seeping into the room. Sam didn't bother to close it. It was an unnecessary distraction at the moment. Someone was in the apartment and he had to find him.

There was a slight creak from the kitchen, and Sam instantly stopped in his tracks. His heart was pounding in his chest. This was the most action he'd had since he stopped that mugger last year, but some instincts didn't go away no matter what you did. He listened carefully for any indication of what the thief was doing in his kitchen, of all places, but he didn't hear anything else. The light was off in there, too, but Sam was planning on using that to his advantage. He slid his left hand through the doorway, finding the light switch with the ease of long practice and familiarity, and in one smooth motion flicked the light on at the same moment that he kicked the door open, bringing the baseball bat up in a defensive move.

Dean sat at his kitchen table, an open bottle of whiskey at his right hand. "If I'd been a burglar with a gun, you'd probably be dead by now Sammy," he said. His voice was rougher than Sam remembered, deeper.

Sam looked down at him with shock. "Dean?"

"Hey, Sammy. Hope you don't mind, I let myself in."

He looked his brother over critically. "You look like shit." It was true. Dean looked haggard, older than he should, with dark circles under his eyes and the kind of pallor that meant his brother had probably spent some time in the hospital. There were fading bruises on Dean's neck that looked disturbingly like they would fit a pair of hands and a neat row of stitches that stretched across his right forearm.

"Come on, you know that's not true. I'm the good-looking one in this family." The words should have been spoken with a bit of cockiness and a fair dose of humor, but they came across as flat, rote.

"Why are you here, Dean?" Sam knew that whatever it was, the result wouldn't be good.

The half-hearted smile slid off his brother's face. "We need to talk."

"You couldn't call?"

"You never answer." There was bitterness in Dean's voice at this statement. "And this is something I couldn't tell you on a voice mail that you might not even listen to."

"What's wrong, Dean?"

Dean reached for the whiskey bottle next to him. "A lot of stuff is wrong, Sam." He tipped the bottle up and drank straight from it rather than get a glass. The words that came out of his mouth once he was done swallowing sounded like they'd been dragged out of his throat with pliers. "Dad's dead."

Sam stared at him. He had to have heard wrong. "What?"

"You heard me." There was another long swallow from the whiskey bottle. "He's dead. Died three days ago. I just finished taking care of the body."

_Salt and burn the bones_, Sam thought. "What happened?"

"We caught up to something bad and it took out Dad before I finished it off," Dean said. "I just figured you'd want to know." He stood up, a little unsteadily, and winced just the tiniest bit. He was probably hiding more injuries beneath his clothing and that damned leather jacket. "See you around, Sammy. I've got to get on the road."

"No, you're not going anywhere," Sam snapped out, his mind whirling. Dad couldn't be dead. John Winchester was way too tough to be taken out like that.

Dean's eyes glittered and he suddenly looked less like Sam's pain-in-the-ass big brother and more like the incredibly dangerous man he'd been raised to be. "I'm pretty sure you can't stop me, Sam."

"Bullshit. You're drunk and you're injured. My girlfriend could probably take you out."

"Your girlfriend, maybe. Definitely not you, though." He ducked past Sam and headed back into the living room, going back to the window despite the fact that Sam was awake and he could use the door now.

Jess was standing in the doorway, blinking sleepily at the two of them. "What's going on?" she asked, obviously only half awake but making an effort to change that.

Sam rapidly recalculated. Dean was currently at a level of intoxication that he'd never seen in his brother, he was clearly grieving, and he was injured. This was not the kind of situation he wanted for when Jessica met his brother. "It's nothing, Jess. Go back to bed, I'll explain later."

Dean snorted. "Sure you will. That should give you enough time to make up something that sounds a little normal." He had made it to the window by now and was concentrating a little too hard on the view outside. Sam had a feeling that he didn't want to go out by the door and he didn't want Jess to see him leave through the window.

"Dean, come on. Don't be an idiot."

His brother's back stiffened a little. "That's enough, Sam. I'm gone." There was one last glance at Jess that Sam couldn't read and then Dean was through the window with no visible sign that he was injured.

Sam let him go and turned his attention back to Jess. Dean would hold for the time being, but his girlfriend would not. She was staring at the open window in shock. A tiny corner of his mind admitted that it was a typical reaction to Dean. "Who was that?" she asked.

"That was Dean," he said, dropping down onto the couch with a sigh. He needed to process what Dean had told him, but Jess needed some kind of explanation first.

"Your brother Dean?"

"Yeah." There was more that he needed to say, but he couldn't make his mouth form the words. His brother had dropped a bomb on his head and disappeared. He wanted to say it was typical Dean, but his brother had never left him in the lurch like this. He felt abandoned and alone. It was worse than when he left for Stanford with his father's words ringing in his ears.

"Why didn't he use the door?"

Sam laughed, but it was shallow and short-lived. "Why use a door when there's a window handy?" At her alarmed expression, he patted the couch cushion next to him. "Dean likes to think he's Batman sometimes."

She nodded, absorbing the information. "What did he want?"

Sam swallowed down the lump in his throat. "My father is dead. He died a few days ago."

"Oh, Sam," Jess murmured. She sat down next to him and put her arms around him, and Sam just let go. He didn't cry for long, though it felt like forever. He knew he had to be freaking Jess out. She'd never seen him cry. He'd never had a reason until now.

"When's the funeral?" she asked once he'd settled down a little. "I'll start calling around and letting people know we'll be gone."

He shook his head. "No funeral. Dad didn't want any kind of service or burial. Just cremation." It was the closest thing to the truth that he could say. There was no explaining the odd ceremony of a hunter's funeral pyre.

"I'm guessing your brother was closer to him than you were," Jess said. It felt like she was fishing for something to say, something that would make this easier. This was how normal people grieved, after all. They had a funeral and a memorial service and the survivors all spent time talking. "Did he say what happened?"

"Some kind of hunting accident," Sam said, stretching the truth just a little. "I don't think Dean was in any position to be talking about it yet."

"You'll talk to him when he's ready," she promised, hugging him again. Sam relaxed into her embrace, letting it sooth him.

"I'll call him when he's had a chance to cool down."

xxx

"Lets go through it one more time," the man said, his voice neutral. "Run through your day yesterday, leading to when you discovered your son was missing this morning."

Sam knew it was their job to ask questions. Knew that asking variations of the same question could unlock some unconscious memory, and that the detectives just wanted to help him find Peter as soon as possible. With all that said, if someone didn't stop asking him stupid, repetitive questions and give him something to do there might be violence. They were all just standing around talking, and Peter was out there, scared and _away from him_ and probably hurt. Sam's heart was pounding so hard it was making him a little dizzy.

"I picked him up from day care at around three," he said, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "Went to tae kwon do class, picked up some takeout, and headed home. Peter did his homework after dinner, I worked on some casefiles, and then we watched a movie together before Peter went to bed around nine. I stayed up 'til about eleven thirty to get a little more work done, checked on him before I went to bed. When I got up at six, his room was like that."

He gestured toward the small bedroom. The window was gone, not broken or open but simply _removed_, leaving a gaping hole in the wall. Peter's pillow sat forlornly at the head of the twin bed and the blankets were in a pile at the foot. Sam knew that his son had been taken, knew that nothing human would have been able to take out the window without waking him up and that no human would need to go so far to take Peter.

Eventually, the detectives finished up their questions and set up the wiretap in case the kidnapper calls to ask for ransom, and Sam escaped their watchful eyes with the simple task of asking to be left alone for a while. He promised to call if the kidnappers contacted him and escorted them from his apartment.

Once he was alone, Sam moved to the doorway of his son's bedroom and remembered. Jessica had been beautiful holding their newborn son. Granted, he might be biased since he had also found her beautiful when he was cursing like a sailor and clutching at his hand so tightly that it took hours to regain all the feeling. "You ready to hold him?" she had asked, and Sam had swallowed and held out his hands. She passed their son over to him carefully and Sam had settled the infant in the crook of his arm the way they'd practiced. Peter had been tiny, just over seven pounds, with a soft cap of dark hair that fell out and grew back in blond when he was six months old. Sam had promised himself that he would do better than his father, that he would protect his son and make sure that Peter was happy.

And then his father's world had reached out with greedy, horrible fingers to grab one more Winchester.

There was a throwaway cell tucked into his desk drawer. It was habit to keep one around for emergencies, even years after he'd been hunting. Sam retrieved it, sat down at his desk and made a call he was dreading.

"Singer," the voice on the other end of the line said, and Sam swallowed back the memories that gruff salutation brought up to the surface.

"Bobby, it's Sam Winchester."

There was a long, dreadful pause. "Sam," the older man finally drawled out. "Haven't heard from you in a while."

"Yeah, I know." A little more than a decade, honestly, but who was counting? "Um, sorry?"

Bobby sighed into the receiver. "So what is it you want, boy?"

"Something took my son," Sam said. He meant for it to come out quiet and collected, like the lawyer he was. It was a total surprise when he heard John Winchester's growl come out of his mouth.

"You're sure it's something and not someone?"

Sam thought about the gaping hole in the wall of his fourteenth-story apartment. "I'm sure, Bobby."

"You call your brother?"

Sam thought of the last time he'd seen Dean, weaving unsteadily in the funeral home parking lot. "Wasn't planning on it."

"I'm not getting in the middle of Winchester bullshit, Sam. Call Dean, you idjit. He's the guy you should be talking to, anyway." There was the sound of a door closing and then Bobby's voice came through a little more clearly. "He's been handling things that go after kids pretty much exclusively the last couple of years. We'd be saving a whole lot of time just going straight to him. You know how much that means when you're looking for a missing kid."

Sam scrubbed at his face with his free hand. "Yeah, I know." It was one of the ways that the supernatural world paralleled his normal, safe one: when a child goes missing, the first twenty-four hours are critical. He switched hands and grabbed a pen. "Go ahead and give me his number."

Bobby's voice, when it replied, was oddly, carefully neutral. "You don't have your brother's phone number?"

Damn it, he did not have time for this. "I haven't talked to Dean since he showed up drunk at Jess' funeral," he said bluntly. "Tossed his number and changed mine."

There was a sigh on the other end of the line. "I'm way too old for this crap." He rattled off a phone number, complete with area code. "Call your brother, Sam."

There was a click as Bobby hung up on his end, and Sam glared at both the phone and the hastily scribbled number for a second before dialing with more force than necessary. It rang twice before a low-pitched, quiet female voice whispered a quiet, "Hello?"

Great. Sam really didn't need to talk to one of Dean's five-minute girlfriends. "I need to talk to Dean."

"Is this an emergency?" Whatever woman was speaking, she sounded cautious and a little weary.

"Yes," Sam gritted out. "Tell him Sam is calling." It was ten in the morning. Was his brother hung over or something? He had to be pretty out of it to let a one-night-stand answer his phone.

"Just a minute," she said, and he heard murmuring before his brother's voice came on the line, rough with morning gravel.

"Sam?"

Sam, despite what he had said to Bobby earlier, had a hundred different things he wanted to tell his brother. He skipped all of them and went straight to the point. "Something took my son. Something, not someone. Will you come?"

There was a dull rasping sound on the other end, likely Dean rubbing at his face. "You still just outside of Denver?"

"Yeah, same apartment." He hadn't been able to bear moving away from where Jess had lived. The fact that Dean knew where he lived was unsurprising and unimportant.

"I can get there sometime around midnight, probably. Let me get on the road and I'll call you in an hour, get the details." And with that he hung up.

xxx

Dean watched from across the street until the female silhouette melted to join his brother's shadow. Sam would be fine. His girlfriend seemed like a nice chick, not to mention way out of Sam's league, and she would take care of him. Dean had a good feeling about her.

He'd left the bottle of whiskey in Sam's apartment, though, and right now he was too short on cash to get another one. It had been stupid, drinking on top of the minor concussion he was nursing, but it was the only way he could even begin to handle being around Sam for this task.

The things the demon had spouted off about Sam were lies. They had to be. Sam was the kind of guy who rescued kittens from being flattened in traffic. There was no way in hell he was leading an army of demons or consenting to be a host for the devil. And even if it had been telling the truth about what it did to Sam on the night their mom died, that didn't mean anything. Sam was twenty-two years old. If something like that was going to be a problem, it should have showed up by now. None of that mattered, of course. The things the demon had said had taken root and until he managed to pull them out it wasn't safe for him to be around his brother.

He waited until the downstairs light was turned off before climbing wearily into the Impala. He didn't know where he was going, exactly, just that it was going to be away from here. He wanted to bury himself in hunting and alcohol and women until the pain disappeared.

With one last glance at the dark window of the apartment, Dean started the engine and drove away.

xxx

Dean closed the phone and tossed it down onto the bed. He very much wanted to join it, but if he laid back down he wouldn't get be getting up any time soon. "I'm heading back out," he told the woman hovering in the doorway. "Sam's son was taken. He needs me there." God, he wasn't sure how he was going to handle his brother. The last actual conversation they had was when Dad had died. After that it had all been pointed accusations at each other.

Lisa bit her lip, and Dean knew she was holding back a biting comment about how he just got back. "Do you have time for a shower and some food?" she asked instead, and Dean was immensely grateful for the woman he loved.

"Yeah," he answered. "I should spend some of it with Ben, too. I was really looking forward to spending some time with him."

There was another long pause, one he'd come to identify as Lisa making a decision. She was very good at split-second, possibly life-altering decisions. "You could take him with you," she said. "It's Sam who called, right? Your brother? Maybe this would be a good time to mend fences. Ben should know more of your family than your friend Bobby."

Dean thought about it for a second while Lisa came over and sat down next to him on the edge of the bed. "It's a good idea," he admitted. Ben didn't start school for three more weeks, and while he didn't want his son anywhere out in the field this promised to be a lot of research, held safely indoors. "Ben could get a good look at how boring some of this stuff is. Maybe it'll make him back off the idea of being a hunter." He'd put his foot down at the first sign of Ben's interest and gotten Lisa's approval and backing: no hunting until Ben graduated high school a year from now. He could help with research, and both Ben and Lisa had learned gun safety, but Dean wasn't making the same mistakes his father had. Kids should be allowed to have a childhood.

Lisa smiled and wrapped her arms around his waist. "I think that ship has long ago sailed, Dean."

"Yeah, well, I can try," Dean grumbled. He pulled her in close to him, kissing the top of her head. "I should get up. I need to get Ben moving if we're going to get on the road."

"Five minutes," she said. "I'll make them worth your while."

It was more like ten, but Dean counted it as time well spent. Lisa took a lot of shit from his lifestyle and she didn't ask for much in return, so he would gladly give in to just about any of her demands.

He headed down to the mudroom first, intent on moving the load of laundry he'd tossed into the washing machine last night when he got home into the dryer only to find that Lisa had taken care of that for him. Once they found Sammy's kid and he and Ben got back, Dean was taking her out to her favorite restaurant and possibly buying her diamonds. This woman was way better than he deserved.

Ben was playing video games in the living room. Dean got his attention with the simple expedient method of turning off the television, making the boy turn his head and give a mock scowl.

"I'm heading back out on the road in an hour. Want to come with me?"

The teenager's eyes lit up even as he schooled his features into a mask of perfect teenage boredom. "Where are we going?"

"Colorado. Your cousin is missing and we're going to help find him." There was no hesitation in naming Peter Winchester as Ben's cousin. It might not be by blood, but Ben was Dean's son nonetheless.

"Is this a hunt?" The excitement was practically tangible, and Dean was torn between slapping down a resounding 'NO' and basking in the emotions his son was radiating.

"It might be," he finally admitted. "What's important is that your cousin is missing and Sam needs us. I'm going to need you to listen to me and obey me when I tell you to do something. Can you do that for me?"

"Yes!" The control for the Wii dropped onto the coffee table and Ben bolted upstairs.

"One bag only, Ben! Pack mostly clothes," Dean shouted after him. "You will not be needing video games on this trip." There was no way he was carting a game system around in the car. Ben would be helping with research this trip.

He climbed the stairs behind the boy, mind on things like shower and packing his own bag. It would have been nice to linger under the hot water, but Dean sucked it up and made it through in record time. He packed his bag with familiar efficiency, plucking soft, warm, freshly laundered t-shirts out of the basket and rolling them up so they took less space in his duffle, and then headed down into the kitchen. Lisa had a pot of coffee ready, bless her generous soul, and Dean gulped down a scalding hot cup without taking the time for sugar or cream. Sandwiches were the easiest food to put together, so he dug out the lunchmeat and bread and other things and started assembling. Ben dropped his bag by the door and joined him, throwing together lettuce and tomato and turkey onto the whole wheat bread that Lisa insisted they all use. "Eat fast," Dean told him. "We need to get on the road in twenty minutes."

Ben obligingly wolfed down two sandwiches while Dean savored his one. Lisa watched the two of them eat, sipping coffee and teasing them both in turns. "You'll call when you get there?" she asked once the food had disappeared.

"Before we even walk in the door," Dean reassured her. "Sammy probably won't let me get a word in edgewise once we're in, so I don't know when I'll be able to call after that."

"Just try, for my sake." She gave Ben a hug, which the lanky teenager returned with interest, and then embraced Dean, tugging his head down for a kiss.

"Come on, guys," Ben protested. Dean waved him off and pulled Lisa closer, relishing in her warmth and comfort.

"Something to think about while you're at your brother's," she said, staying pressed against him for another moment before stepping back reluctantly. "You two be careful."

"Hey, it's me," Dean said, smiling.

"I know," she agreed. "That's what has me worried."

xxx

The few times he had pictured anything like this, Sam had always imagined that Dean would be at his side, acting as best man. His brother would charm and flirt with the bridesmaids and make the bride smile and generally help Sam through this minefield, like he'd helped with all of the hurdles of Sam's childhood.

There was nothing wrong with Brian, of course. He was a great guy, pretty much Sam's closest friend these days. It was hard sometimes that the man didn't really know him, but Sam was prepared to deal with that. Someday the normal guy mask would be real. All it would take is practice.

This was the latest step. He and Jess were getting married in less than ten minutes. There would be a short honeymoon in San Francisco and then they'd move into the small apartment they'd found near the law school. Jess was finishing up her undergrad and then hopefully going for a Master's in Education. They were already planning on kids once grad school was completed. The future looked perfect.

The only thing marring his perfect day was Dean's absence. The number Sam had for his brother was disconnected and none of his father's old contacts could (or possibly would) give him the current one. He couldn't ask any of them to pass along the message because they weren't invited. This was a clean break from hunting. The only one he wanted here from that life was his brother, and Dean would be expected to leave the shop talk at the door.

Brian cleared his throat. "It's time, man. Can't make the people too nervous."

Sam stood up and followed his best man. Today would be the happiest day of his life. He wouldn't let the fact that his brother wouldn't be here cloud it. Today was about him and Jessica, no one else.

xxx

Sam stared at his own phone for a second before closing it. The phone call to Dean had gone a little differently from what he'd expected. There had been no fuss or dramatics from his brother, and that left him oddly at loose ends.

He filled the time waiting for his brother to call back with data collection, trying to figure out as much as he could before Dean came bumbling into the situation. Dean had never liked the research part of hunting, and as much as Sam resented doing it he wanted his son back as quickly as possible.

The rumble of the Impala's engine was audible beneath his brother's voice when he called back. It made Sam just slightly nostalgic, which in turn pissed him off a little. "So Pete's seven and in, what, second grade?"

"His name is Peter, and they advanced him to third," Sam said, a little stiffly.

"Yeah, sure, whatever you say Sammy," he brother replied. "Tell me what happened."

"It's Sam," he countered before he detailed everything he had observed so far. "I was thinking a rawhead or a changeling."

"If it was changelings, you wouldn't know your kid was missing yet. They swap kids on you, leave behind a double that'll feed on you nice and slow. And a rawhead only goes after bad kids who present easy targets, which I'm betting your kid was not. Is it clear to go into the room?"

"Yeah, cops are gone right now."

"All right. You said the window was removed. Frame too?"

"Frame's still there, but everything else is gone."

There was muttering off the line. "Anything suspicious in the building history?"

"I would never have moved here if there had been," Sam said crossly.

"Hard to let go of the training, huh Sammy?" Sam heard the rustling of the pages and more indistinct speech.

"Are you reading and driving at the same time?" he demanded, a little worried.

"You kidding me? You know I can't read in the car. Listen, Sammy, try to get some sleep. I should be there in twelve hours, give or take." His voice turned surprisingly gentle. "We'll find him, Sammy. We'll find your son. Get some rest. We'll dive in as soon as I get there."

Sam was the one who hung up this time, unsure of what to say. He'd purposefully cut ties with Dean and most of the time he didn't regret it. His brother lived in a world that Sam didn't want to claim anymore, and his presence would have dragged that life back in no matter what Sam did to prevent it.

Except now his father's world had crept in and stolen his son. Sam would deal with the devil himself if it would bring Peter home safe and sound. He was beginning to understand what his father had been doing all those years.

He spent the next several hours doing research and fielding phone calls before the stress and weariness of the day caught up to him and he crashed on the couch. The half-formed dreams kept him from going too deep, every horror that his memory could dredge up chasing after Peter. Sam woke up from his son's terrified face to his burn cell ringing, realizing with slightly groggy confusion that it was almost one in the morning. "Yeah?"

"Open the door, will ya? You've got too many neighbors for me to pick the lock, and they're starting to get curious."

Sam cautiously sat up and went to the door. A peek through the peephole didn't really clear anything up, since all he could see was a beat-up leather jacket. "Dean?"

"In the flesh, Sammy. Open the damn door already."

Sam did as he was asked, rolling his eyes at his brother's attitude. "You know, normal people knock."

Dean walked in, a familiar duffle slung over one shoulder and another in one hand. Sam moved to shut the door when a lanky teenager that was similarly laden with bags followed his brother in. His brother looked scruffy and tired and older than Sam would have thought could be possible. "We did knock, Sam. You didn't answer. Figured you were asleep."

"Who is this?" Dean knew better than to bring strangers into family business.

"Ben, this is my brother Sam," Dean said, turning to the teenager and jerking his head toward Sam. "Sam, this is my son Ben."

xxx

He showed up for Sam's wedding, of course. That was something that the kid should have taken for granted. He lurked in the shadows, more like an ex-boyfriend than a family member, and watched while his brother promised to love, honor, and cherish Jessica. Once Sam moved in for the kiss Dean headed for the door. He needed to be gone before they headed back down the aisle. There was no way in the world he was going to interfere with his brother's attempt at normal.

He drove east, back to the comforting familiarity of the Midwest and back roads and small towns with kitschy motels. There were a half-dozen possible hunts laid out in the notebook on the passenger seat, and all Dean needed to do was pick one. Usually when he didn't choose a case, something found him and it was best to try and avoid that if possible. Dean had made more than a few top-ten most wanted lists, though thankfully none of them belonging to any sort of law enforcement. There were a lot of things out there that wanted him dead, usually for a lot of different reasons.

At first, Dean wasn't even aware that the hunts he was choosing kept leading him further away from California and his brother, but he started making those choices deliberately once he realized it. He salted and burned graves across Nevada, Utah, and Colorado before making a detour around the state of Kansas and up into Nebraska. Ellen Harvelle at the Roadhouse divested him of some of his case files and talked him in to staying for a week or so, most of which was spent working on a couple of projects with Ash. Dean promised to keep working on the database after he left. He wasn't sure if it would work the way Ash hoped, but it couldn't hurt to try. He had nothing but time most days.

Bobby's place was next on his list, with a handful of items that needed a more secure location than the trunk of someone's car. Dean would have been surprised at how many people treated the place like a safety deposit box, but he'd done the same a time or two.

This time it took two weeks to get back on the road. His baby needed a little scheduled maintenance and Bobby had a handful of cars that could be fixed with stuff in the junkyard and turned around for a quick profit. Dean could always use a little extra cash. Credit card fraud was getting more difficult these days.

There was an aswang in Iowa, which was a bit of a change and more than a bit of a surprise. Iowa wasn't exactly known for its Filipino population, and monsters tended to stay around the people groups that they were connected to. There was something odd about the way monsters had been migrating recently, something that he really should look into a little more closely.

A report of actual goblins lead him to Illinois, but it turned out to be a hoax. He found a couple more salt and burns in the state before crossing the border into Indiana.

When he read the news story about the man killed by a table saw, the name of the town pinged in Dean's memory and he smiled despite the macabre reading material. Cicero, Indiana, home to Lisa Braeden, the most memorable weekend of his life. He folded up the paper, wondering if she still lived there and if she would still be interested in a little fun.

It couldn't hurt to look her up while he was digging into the case.

xxx

Dean supposed he should feel bad for dumping that particular nugget of information on his brother. He'd taken his brother's radio silence for a sign that Sam wasn't interested in Dean's life and didn't particularly want Dean in his normal, orderly existence, and so he'd never bothered to tell Sam about Lisa and Ben and his odd semi-settled lifestyle. And then Sam had exploded at his wife's funeral and apparently changed his number. Dean could take a hint with the best of them.

He used the opportunity of Sam's apparently stupefied silence to study his brother covertly. Dean hadn't seen Sam in five years, since Jessica's funeral, and before that he'd only had a glimpse or two when he stopped by to check on him.

Sam had gotten a little softer over the years, courtesy of a desk job, though he was probably in much better shape than the guys he worked with. His hair was cut much shorter than it had been back when he was in Stanford, and even on a day like today he was wearing much nicer clothes than Dean even owned. Same bitchy expression, though, the one he'd been giving pretty much everyone since he hit puberty. Given that particular facial cue, he should have been expecting the derisive snort that came from Sam. "You have a kid?"

There was an eyeroll from Ben, but the teenager managed to keep his mouth shut. There was no telling how long that would last. Better to put this particular discussion off until the current crisis was settled. "Yeah, Sam. I do. We're wasting time. Can I see Pete's room?"

"His name is Peter," Sam announced before apparently realizing that he was supposed to be the adult here. "Come on, in here." He led them down a narrow, short hall and into a dark blue kids bedroom. "Do you have any ideas?"

Dean made a noncommittal noise. "Got a theory, need to check it out."

"What kind of theory?"

Dean sighed. He'd talked the case out with Ben on the long car ride, in between swapping out cassette tapes and giving his son a little time behind the wheel of the Impala. There weren't many things that could have removed the window, even fewer that would have, and most of them wouldn't have been willing to leave Sam asleep and unharmed in the room next door. "The kind that needs a little research to support it, Sam." He walked through the room and over to the window.

"What are we looking for?"

"Reach outside and touch the wall about six inches from the window. If I'm right there should be gray dust there. It'll be very fine, possibly shaped like a handprint."

Sam did as he was asked (definitely asked, and not told, because he would never do something his brother told him to again). "Got it."

"All right, bring it back into the light. See anything?"

All three of them watched as Sam examined the powder underneath the dim overhead light. "It's sparkling," Sam said, an oddly aggrieved expression on his face. "It's sparkly gray dust. Did Edward Cullen take Peter?"

"Sparkly emo vampires don't really exist, Sammy. The real ones have no problem with sunlight. No, I think we've got bigger problems." Dean hadn't wanted to be right on this one. It would be a bitch to crack. "I think Pete was taken by a child thief."

"I've never heard of it." There was that expression on Sam's face again, the one he used to make when Dean would tell Sam that girls were really aliens.

"Child thief's just what I call them. It's the spirit of some kid who died of neglect. They usually go to other children in the night, looking for companionship. Peter Pan was based on one that the author encountered once." He had no idea why they left the dust behind, just that they did. His current working theory was that it had to do with the dirt where they were buried.

Ben was nodding along now. "It got all mixed up with the idea of fairy changelings, but that's not how real changelings operate." He rubbed the faint scar on the back of his neck, a mark that several of his friends shared.

"Right." Dean spared a quick and hopefully reassuring smile for his son. Sam had a sour expression on his face, the kind that gave Dean flashbacks to when his brother was the kind of angsty, emo teenager that gave other teenagers a bad name. Thank _God_ Ben skipped over that stage. Once was enough for that kind of shit. "The problem is that this particular spirit doesn't seem to be tied to any one specific location. It can apparently pop up pretty much anywhere within a general area, since I can't find any bad history for at least a mile radius."

"This area doesn't have any history of disappearing kids."

"That you know of," Dean pointed out. "It usually takes kids who are feeling lonely and neglected. If it played it smart, no one would know or care that kid was missing. Chalk it up to some foster kid running away and everyone moves on with their lives."

Sam was practically bristling with indignation, probably seeing Dean's info dump as a smack on his parenting skills, and Dean was suddenly much too tired to put up with anything right now. "Coffee," he said, working to keep his tone civil. He knew there was no way Sam would be letting them sleep, not with his son on the line. It was why he'd made Ben sleep for part of the drive. One of them should at least be well-rested. "We'll sit down and make a plan for the research we're going to need to do."

"Please tell me you know how to catch it," Sam said, practically pleading.

"It's a spirit, Sammy. Bound by the same rules, when you boil it all down. Figure out who it used to be, find the bones, salt and burn. Pete should be somewhere around the body." He grabbed the bag with the laptop and headed for the small kitchen table.

"Just because I haven't hunted in a while doesn't mean I'm stupid," Sam huffed. "It's never that simple."

"Of course it isn't," Dean agreed. "Just figuring out who this kid was is going to be a bitch. Depending on how long its been active, we'll have to separate out its possible victims. And there's a pretty good possibility that the kid was never properly buried in the first place."

Ben's eyes widened at the ever-increasing list of questions they would need to research and he hurried over to the table, pulling his chair up next to Dean's. "Let's get started, then," he said, a tinge of excitement in his voice that Dean hoped his brother would overlook right now.

By the time the sky started to lighten in the east, the bloom was definitely off the rose when it came to Ben's approach to hunting. The teenager was sacked out on the couch, breathing deeply and evenly with the kind of effortless sleep only the young can truly pull off, and Dean envied him. He found it nearly impossible to do anything similar with his brother's wounded, worried eyes looking at him, but if he didn't make some kind of move beyond coffee he was going to be almost worthless. He pushed up from his chair, wincing as knees popped, and cracked his neck. "I'm going for a run," he told his brother.

"We've still got a ton of stuff to go through," Sam protested, just like Dean thought he would.

"I've got to do something right now," Dean told him. "We don't have time for me to sleep, but if I don't step away from the computer and do something else for a while my mind's going to shut down completely." He nudged Ben on his way to the bathroom. "Going for a run in five," he told him.

"I'm coming," Ben said in a sleepy grumble. He was still dressed in shorts and a T-shirt from the drive, which gave him a three-minute reprieve while Dean changed out of his jeans and into the track pants that Lisa had bought for him with the insistence that he quit killing himself with sweats in August if he wasn't going to wear shorts. Dean just didn't like the idea of the scars on his legs displayed for everyone in the world to see. That kind of thing was no one's business but his own, and maybe Lisa's.

Sam gave them a baleful look over the computer screen when headed outside before returning to his research. Dean could sympathize; if something had happened to Ben he would move heaven and earth to help his son.

The neighborhood was still relatively cool and quiet. School hadn't started yet, so other than a few kids who probably had some kind of pre-season sports practice and people with early jobs the streets were empty. Ben allowed Dean to set the pace, which he appreciated. Dean was a distance runner who was built for endurance and could run just about anyone he knew into the ground given time, but Ben had about three inches on him and could outstrip him when it came to sprints.

"Sam's not what I was expecting," Ben said, once they were a block or so away.

"Yeah? What did you think he'd be like?"

"Like you," the boy said frankly.

"Sorry, kiddo," Dean told him. "Sam's always been more like my dad than me. But it works for him. Besides, I wouldn't seem nearly so awesome if everyone was just like me."

Ben made a scoffing sound. "Why doesn't he like me?"

"Sam's got issues with me. That's fine, I've got problems with him too, and someday we'll get those all worked out. That doesn't mean he doesn't like you."

"He hasn't actually said anything to me yet," Ben pointed. "Not even, 'hey, hand me that book.'"

"He's distracted, Ben. He's got a right to be. If something had taken you I doubt your mom or me would notice if a nun came into the house and started a striptease."

"Ew, Dad. Too much information."

"Hey, sometimes the young ones are kind of hot," Dean defended. They jogged past the entrance to a local park and then made a loop and headed inside. "The point is, don't be too hard on my brother. He's spent most of his life trying to make his life fit into a nice, neat box labeled normal. You didn't fit his definition of me."

Ben was quiet as they pounded down the dirt path, dodging tree roots and overhanging branches. "Why didn't you tell him about me?" he asked after a while.

"By the time I came to you and your mom, Sam made it clear that I didn't fit into his world. He ran away from the hunting circus to become a lawyer and he was happy, and the blood and salt and sulfur of hunting didn't match what he wanted." Dean glanced at his son, a smile forming. "Besides, I think this little adventure has proven that Sam can't handle the awesomeness that is Benjamin Isaac Braeden." Not yet, at least. Dean had hopes for the future. It felt good having his two families in one place.

There was a snort. "His loss."

"Damn straight." He picked up the rhythm a little, Ben catching up smoothly. "We're going to have to go straight to the research," he said. "There's too much that we can't get over the Internet. You mind doing the eager high school student?"

"Dude, I am the eager high school student." Ben was beaming now, trying to play down his excitement to be a part of the hunt.

"All right," Dean said. They made another circuit of the park in silence before heading back towards Sam's apartment building. "Race you," Dean said, pouring on the speed. This was probably going to be a mistake, but Ben smiled as he sprinted ahead of him and he couldn't regret it.

Part Two

Being a parent was harder than he expected from watching John Winchester. Of course, Sam was usually happy to point out that John left most of the day-to-day stuff to Dean when they were growing up. His brother had somehow made it seem effortless, which some dim corner of his mind was marveling at through layers of exhaustion. There were two of them to watch over Peter, and he was still young enough that he slept at least half of the day, but somehow he and Jess ended up dropping into bed bone-tired every single night. Of course, Sam was also working his tail off at the new law firm, trying to prove himself through research as he worked his way up the ladder and Jess had just started a job with the school system that evaluated the way children were taught to learn.

With the way things were going with their love life, Peter was pretty much doomed to be an only child. Especially since they might have to scrape together their money and find some sort of caretaker during the day. It would have been easier if Jess hadn't fallen in love with Colorado. They'd moved far enough away from her family that there would be no easy way for his in-laws to drop in and watch Peter. Jess had no plans to abandon her career before it had even started to stay home with their son, no matter how much she loved him, and Sam needed the law firm to keep him sane. Sam thrived on the challenge of the cases and the research that each one required, but he also craved the time spent with his wife and son.

It was hard _not_ to adore Peter. Even as an infant, he was good-natured and quiet, rarely kicking up a fuss unless he was sick. His eyes stayed blue, to match Jessica's eyes, and he had a way of studying whoever was around him.

Jessica glowed with pride in every one of Peter's accomplishments, declaring him to be the smartest baby in the world. One of Sam's greatest pleasures was watching Jessica play with Peter in the mornings. They shared both play and work and chores with Peter, but Jess was a morning person and she had pretty much claimed the early hours with their son as her own. Sam spent the late afternoon walking the floor with Peter while Jess caught a nap, and then they spent the rest of the night together.

It worked, to some degree. Sam sometimes missed the early days of their marriage, when they'd moved to Colorado and it had been just the two of them in a new, strange city, but he wouldn't trade Peter for anything.

xxx

Sam was still sitting in front of the computer when his brother and his nephew came jostling back into the apartment. Dean might have had a point about the necessity of physical activity; he seemed much more awake and alive than Sam felt right now. "Dibs on the shower," Dean called as they walked through the living room. "Age before beauty, dude. Go over and be smelly around your Uncle Sam."

Ben did as his father directed, grabbing a bottle of water from the fridge and plopping down next to Sam. "Did you find anything while we were gone?"

"Nothing new," Sam muttered. His eyes felt like they were filled with sand and his mouth tasted like rancid coffee. "Where did you two go?"

"The park down the road," Ben said, shrugging. "We made a couple of loops and then headed back."

"Where did you park the car when you got there?" Sam had never been able to find a good parking place, though he'd never headed out this early in the morning.

Ben gave him a skeptical look. "It's just a mile. We ran there."

Sam wasn't quite sure why that surprised him. He remembered two hours minimum of PT when they were teenagers, every day after school, but that had fallen by the way when he left for Stanford. He still stayed in shape, but running five miles in a morning seemed excessive. "So, you play in any sports in school?"

Ben made a derogatory sound that could have been recorded in the late 90's from Dean Winchester. "I run cross country and track. Football's for jerks and assholes and baseball's for little whiny bitches."

"Watch the language, kiddo," Dean said from the other room. "Your mother hears you talk like that and its _me_ she'll come after. My clothes in there?'

"Yeah, dad," the teenager said, making no move to get up and carry it in to the other room.

"Great," Dean said, coming in to the common area. He was wearing a pair of dress slacks, a dress shirt in one hand. "This one has blood stains on it," he explained, rooting around in the bag for a clean one. In the bright morning light the scars on his torso stood out like neon, some of them old and familiar and some of them new to Sam. There was a tattoo over his heart, a pentacle inside of a sun that Sam had never seen.

"You're supposed to let mom know about those, not just toss them into the laundry," Ben told him, standing up and stripping off his own sweat-stained T-shirt, revealing an identical tattoo on his own skinny chest. "Shower's free?"

"Yeah, go ahead," Dean said absently, oblivious to Sam's stare.

Sam waited until the water was running before he turned to his brother. "What's up with the matching tramp stamps?"

"Lisa's is a tramp stamp," Dena corrected, still digging around for a clean shirt. "She figured it would look less obvious if it was in a normal location. I swear I packed more than one dress shirt."

"Dean!" Sam waited until he had his brother's full and undivided attention. "What's with the tattoos? I don't recognize the symbol."

"Prevents demonic possession," Dean said, looking up at last, a clean if slightly wrinkled shirt in his hand. "Bobby found it a while back."

"Demons?" Sam had never actually seen a demon back when he lived in the hunting world, but he'd thought they were rare. Having your teenage son tattooed seemed a little like overkill.

"They had a major uptick about ten years ago. I ended up on a few demonic most-wanted lists and it just made sense to make it harder for them to get to me or the family."

Sam nodded, absorbing this. It didn't surprise him that Dean had managed to piss off demons. Dean could piss off anyone when he wanted to. "And the suit?"

"We're not going to find everything we need on the Internet," Dean said. He started buttoning up the white shirt, not bothering to iron it. "A suit and badge opens up doors."

"You can't go around pretending to be a cop around here," Sam protested. "I live here. Someone will put the two of us together."

Dean rolled his eyes and returned to his bag, rummaging for a second before pulling something out and tossing it onto the table. "Get your panties out their bunch, Sam. I'm a licensed private investigator. I'll just claim to be looking into the disappearance of some of those kids we turned up."

Sam picked up the ID wallet and studied it carefully. "This is a really good fake," he finally said.

"It's real," Dean told him shortly, looping a tie around his neck. "I'm licensed in almost every state now. Can't drag identity fraud home."

"That's a good idea," Sam admitted. "Way less likely to get you in trouble like the FBI badges."

"Yeah, well it's got its downsides. When you've got an FBI badge you can pretty much get any information you want. With this, it's all about the charm and the story I spin. Have to work twice as hard to get the information sometimes, but Lisa will kill me if she has to bail me out for impersonating an officer of the law."

Sam nodded, standing up and cracking his neck. His head felt like it weighed about forty pounds and he hoped Ben didn't take too long in the shower. He had no idea how Dean was still going strong. The only thing keeping him awake and aware was his worry for Peter. "So where are we going and what do we need?"

Dean slipped on a suit coat. He'd shaved the graying two-day beard and looked oddly professional. "Ben's going in to the police station. He's going to be looking for a spike in statistics on runaways, supposedly for a school project, since there weren't any unsolved kidnappings in the area. I'm going to be looking at county records, combing through deaths. This is turning out to be a bitch to narrow down, and I could use an extra pair of eyes if you want to join me. We'll stop and get something to eat on the way so Ben doesn't start gnawing on the upholstery."

xxx

It was like a puzzle piece fitting into place, except that was the kind of geeky analogy that Dean had no intention of using. An engine being tuned up and brought into alignment, then, or a gun getting stripped apart, cleaned and reassembled properly after being mishandled. Dean Winchester was now Ben's dad and Lisa's guy, and for the first time in a long time he felt like he belonged. He was home.

That didn't mean that everything went smoothly. His childhood didn't make the kind of happy blueprint that you could follow in any normal situation. He slipped up half a dozen times in the first year, leaving guns lying around where Ben could get to them (the panic of that one meant it only happened once, and he made sure to train the both of them in how to use a gun and to keep the majority of them locked away in the trunk after that), drinking too much, or being a little too colorful around Ben than made Lisa comfortable. When you consider how much he traveled that year, it wasn't a good track record.

When he heard about Sam's son being born he went to see his brother. He almost took Ben and Lisa with him, but it was the middle of the school year and Lisa put her foot down. Her decision made things a little easier in one respect. Lisa would have expected them to actually go in and talk with Sam and Jessica, maybe hold the kid or spend the night, and Dean had no intention of doing any of those things.

Sam didn't want him there. He knew that one like he knew how to breathe air. His brother hadn't called to tell him what had happened, even though Dean knew he had the number. He'd found out about the newest family member because he had a news search set up for his brother's name and the birth announcement had shown up in his inbox, sandwiched between case dockets where Sam had been involved. But Dean had to see his new nephew with his own eyes. He needed to know that his brother was happy and that Sam and Jessica were doing well, that they were both healthy and that they were safe.

Sam and his wife had already brought the baby home from the hospital by the time Dean got to Colorado, which made things easier. By now he'd had enough practice in his life at looking vaguely respectable while loitering and casing out places that he managed to blend in with the neighbors. The older lady on the first floor was happy to share the gossip about the young couple on the fourteenth and their new baby to the guy who had just moved into the building.

It took two days of this before he got a glimpse of the three of them. Jessica was pushing the stroller and Sam was following close behind with an unbelievable number of bags. They were too far away for Dean to get more than a vague impression of the baby hidden away inside, and he didn't want to risk things by getting closer, but he could tell from the lack of rushing and the generally upbeat but tired body language that all was well.

It wasn't perfect, not by a long shot, but it would have to do.

xxx

Sam hadn't seen his brother in more than a decade, unless you counted the three minutes or so of stumbling and slurring that Dean had put in at Jess' funeral. He'd been understandably too distracted then to really notice anything beyond the drunken swaying, but now he was sitting here with nothing better to do than study his brother and his apparent nephew. Dean navigated the streets of Sam's small suburb like he'd lived there for years, heading toward the street where the police station, the hospital, and county records all resided.

He wasn't quite sure what to expect when it came to his brother, although probably somewhere deep in his subconscious he was dreading a clone of John Winchester. Some part of him was also awaiting the lean, sharp twenty-two year old that had shoved an envelope of cash into his hands before Sam got onto the bus that would take him to Stanford and Jess and everything that was his life. Neither option was quite what he was delivered, thankfully, although the appearance of the teenage son at his side was a little suspect at best. When he'd arrived Dean had a day or two of stubble with a surprising amount of grey in it and a sprinkling of silver in his hair and at his temples, but he was missing the cold-eyed stare that still stood out to him as John Winchester's stock in trade.

Ben said something that made Dean laugh quietly, making the lines crinkle up around his eyes and mouth and the scar that snaked across one temple and along his jawline disappear for a moment. "I'm pretty sure your mom would kill me, dude. Next year, maybe, I'll buy you a beer, as long as you don't tell her about it."

"Come on, it'll be our secret," Ben said, a note of mischief in his voice that was a flashback to Sam's childhood. It was unbelievable how much the kid acted like Dean sometimes.

"Not a chance," Dean said, pulling the car into the hospital parking lot. "I like sex and not sleeping on the couch."

"TMI!"

"I'm sure you'll recover. You know what you're going for?"

"Information on the statistics of runaways for a research paper," Ben said promptly. "I'm looking for any increase in pre-teens over the last twenty years."

"And if you don't find it?"

"Go back further."

"Good boy." Ben got out of the car and straightened the button-up shirt that Dean had practically forced him to wear, reaching back into the vehicle for the messenger bag that contained a battered laptop and a couple of notebooks and texts that would make his claim a little more believable. He walked into the police station across the street from the small hospital, utilizing that same confident strut that Sam recognized from his brother.

"God, it's like you cloned yourself," Sam said with a little disgust. That particular brand of self-assurance had been both the envy and the bane of Sam's teenage existence.

Dean watched the teenager go with an odd expression on his face. "He's not really my son, Sam. Not by blood, anyway."

Sam turned to his brother in shock. "You told me he was!"

"There was a chance," Dean conceded. "His mom and I go way back. But she said she had him tested back when he was born so that his asshole father would pay child support. But he's been mine for ten years now, since I moved in with his mom. I just wanted you to stop looking for me in him. Anything that's awesome about Ben came from Lisa."

"And she lets you take her son on hunts?"

"This is the first one he's ever been on. I taught him how to defend himself, but I wasn't going to let him go on a hunt until after he'd graduated high school. I kind of hoped I could talk him out of the idea by then."

"So what happened?"

"You needed help," Dean said simply. "Lisa thought this would be a good chance for Ben to meet his uncle and his cousin."

"But I'm not his uncle," Sam protested.

"I might not be Ben's father, but I'm his Dad." His brother rubbed at his forehead, a new mannerism that Sam was learning to interpret as an incipient headache. "You and Peter and Bobby are all his family just as much as Lisa's sister and mother." He opened the car door with a creak and stepped out of the Impala. "You coming in, or do you want to wait here?"

"No, I'm coming." Sam got out of the car, tucking the revelation away where he could reflect on it later, once Peter was safe. When he first called Dean, he'd had no inkling that he could make up with his brother again, or that he would even want to. Trust Dean to make him rethink that plan.

xxx

Everything hurt. That was the first thought that swam up from the bottom of his subconscious. Even his eyes ached in their sockets as too-bright light pummeled them harshly. Sam knew that there was something important that he should be trying to remember, but it was hard to come up against the pain and find it.

"Mr. Winchester? Sam, can you hear me?"

He didn't know the voice that was trying to stab through his skull. Why was a stranger talking to him right now? Couldn't whoever it was let him sleep?

"Mr. Winchester?" A gloved hand pried open one eyelid and aimed the beam of a penlight at his pupil. "Are you with us now, Mr. Winchester?"

"Think so," Sam admitted. There was no way they were going to let him get any sleep now.

The doctor that the penlight belonged to gave a quick, professional concussion check, asking all the questions that Sam dimly remembered administering to his father and brother when they came back from a hunt injured. When she was finished, she sat down on the seat next to him, her expression solemn and grave. Sam had a feeling he didn't like what she was about to say.

"There was an accident," she began, and Sam's mind immediately jumped to Peter, and then to Jess, wondering where they were.

"Peter?" he asked.

"That would be your son?" Sam nodded, and she hurried to reassure him. "Your son is fine. He wasn't in the car at the time of the accident."

Sam felt a rush of relief that disappeared almost as quickly as it had arrived, because the doctor was looking sympathetic. "Jess?"

"I'm sorry to say that your wife didn't make it," she said, her voice calm and just as sympathetic as her expression. "There will be an official autopsy, of course, but right now it looks as if she died instantly on impact."

Sam didn't hear beyond the first sentence the woman had uttered, because Jessica was dead. His wife was dead, and Peter would never truly remember his mother, and his family really was cursed.

xxx

It must be the beard, Sam decided. It just made no sense to him how easily the woman behind the desk gave in to his brother's request for records he had no right to see. The lean matron behind the desk was old enough to be their mother, so it couldn't be the flirting, and the identification card that listed him as a private detective might be real but it wasn't enough to compel the records he was being given. The beard must give him some sort of aura of trustworthiness that he otherwise lacked, much like it had for their father.

"Thanks for the help, Vicky," Dean practically purred, smiling down at her, and the older woman instantly melted in her ergonomic chair.

"It was no problem, honey. I just hope those records help you find some closure for those poor families." She smiled benevolently at Dean with her hands primly folded on the desk.

"Oh, I'm sure it will," he said, reaching out to take her hand. "Really, thank you so much. I couldn't have done it without you." He squeezed her hand once before he turned and left, Sam trailing along in his wake.

"Unbelievable," Sam muttered once they were out of earshot. "I can't believe you just did that."

Dean shrugged, not quite containing his smile. "Some people just have what it takes."

"You just lied to that poor woman," Sam hissed out. "She could get fired for what she gave you."

"I didn't lie, Sam. Not technically."

"You said the family of a missing child hired you."

There was another shrug. "Okay, so you're paying me crap for it. I still consider it a hire. Besides, it got me information on the area that might help me find your son, so why are you complaining?"

That was a very good point. Sam wasn't sure why it bothered him that his brother had just waltzed in and spent forty-five minutes buttering up a file clerk to get information that they needed to find his son. He had a half-smothered guilty feeling that it was simple jealousy. He shook his head to clear it. "Nothing. It doesn't matter. Do you think the kid is done?"

"We'll meet up at the car. After coffee," his brother added, walking into the tiny place on the main street that resisted all attempts to disappear into the gaping maw of the Starbucks down the street. Sam shook his head again, this time in bemusement at his brother, and followed him.

xxx

Bobby was the one who told him about Jessica, calling Dean while he was waiting in the emergency room for someone to take a look and make sure he hadn't actually fractured his skull. One of his dad's hard and fast rules had been not to fuck around when it came to head injuries, and it while Dean was starting to realize that he had all kinds of issues with the man, the things John Winchester had taught when it came to hunting still held true.

The doctor wouldn't let him drive with the severe concussion (and not a fractured skull, thankfully) no matter what his reasons, going so far as to confiscate his keys like Dean was drunk and in need of a designated driver, and he asked Bobby to swing over into Wyoming on the way from South Dakota and pick him up. He called Lisa to let her know what was going on. She'd never met Sam, and she'd only once questioned his decision to stay away from his brother, but now she was determined to go to the funeral and to bring Ben along. She promised to meet them there and then hung up.

Dean spent the time waiting for Bobby alternately trying to ignore the pain and disorientation from the concussion and worrying about Sam. He had an inkling of what his brother was going through right now, thinking about what he would do if he lost Lisa and Ben. The only ray of light in the whole matter was that Pete had been at home with a babysitter. His nephew was safe and unharmed, and he knew that would be a comfort, would probably be the thing that ended up holding Sam together.

He lost some time somewhere in there, because one moment he was sitting down at the hospital and the next he was riding shotgun in his own car, Bobby behind the wheel and country music playing on the radio. Bobby glanced over at him with the same gruff concern that Dean remembered from when he was twelve and his father had dragged him back from his first hunt with what was also his first concussion.

"You sure you should be doing this?" the older man asked. "You're pretty banged up."

"He's my brother," Dean pointed out, making a valiant effort not to slur his words. This particular concussion was a bitch and he was damned lucky he was conscious at all. "I need to be there."

He slept for most of the drive. Bobby woke him every two hours and made him answer the questions, but otherwise left him alone. This wasn't the first time he'd nursed a Winchester through a head injury, and it probably wouldn't be the last.

Bobby woke him up with a curt, "We're here," and a nudge applied with his foot so that he stayed out of range if Dean took it badly. He'd mostly toned down his reactions out of fear that Lisa or Ben would be caught by them at home, but sometimes when he was injured reflex took over and Bobby knew that.

"Awesome," he mumbled, sitting up and trying valiantly to smooth his rumpled suit. He'd had the sense to dress at the hospital, though he didn't really remember it now. Bobby was similarly dressed and similarly rumpled, though he'd gone the extra measure of removing his ball cap. It made Bobby look surprisingly old, his thinning hair mostly grey, and Dean was struck with the desire to ask him to put the hat back on. Sam would understand. "Lisa and Ben here yet?"

"I don't see 'em. She was going to fly out, but you know how airports are nowadays."

Right. Dean vaguely remembered that. He just really wanted them here, suddenly. He and Lisa weren't the marrying kind, either one of them, but he knew he would stay with them forever if she'd let him. All he could think about was how Sammy didn't have someone like that anymore, someone who shared his bed and the sink in the bathroom and who would sometimes buy his favorite coffee for him for no particular reason. "Think I should wait for them?"

Bobby sighed. "I think if you're going to head in there, you better do it now so your brother has a chance to recover. Does he know you're coming?"

Dean shook his head, wincing against the explosions that left behind. "I couldn't get through to talk to him."

"We better get in there now, then. You can introduce them all later."

xxx

Dad was right. Digging through haystacks of papers looking for a needle that might not even be in the pile and that looked exactly like every other needle in the pile kind of sucked. Ben had a feeling that he was never going to stop sneezing. It was a good thing he didn't have asthma or allergies.

At least the local cops had completely bought his story about doing a research project on runaways and had willingly shared the statistics he needed. They had even allowed him into the archives of old cold cases, though he was completely supervised the entire time. It was more than they had hoped for.

Of course, that stroke of luck had been what brought him to dusty, moldy paper hell, but he was uncovering quite a bit of information that would probably be useful in the search for Petey. Ben was chalking this one up as a win.

He had filled up five typed pages of notes on his laptop before he received a text message from his father asking if he was finished yet.

Ben hadn't technically found what he was trying to find. There were no spikes in the number of runaways from the immediate area, though the overall number was unusually high for the size of the town. That in itself meant something, probably that whatever spirit was doing this was relatively old and settled. He sent back a message telling dad he was on his way and packed up under the watchful eye of the supervising officer.

He was diverted from his original destination by a second text message, simply saying, 'coffee.' Ben knew Dean well enough by now to know that he needed to walk past the Starbucks and into the tiny coffee shop half a block over. He'd known his dad to go really far out of his way to avoid Starbucks, since Dean thought their coffee tasted like overly sweet crap and that their stores were way too girly and rubber-stamp 'trendy.'

The barista behind the counter was a couple of years older than him and way hot, so he took a moment to flirt while Dean and Sam waited near the door. Sam looked annoyed by the delay, but Dean mostly looked quietly amused. "Got your girly coffee?" he asked.

Ben nodded, throwing his father a quick grin. He'd tried drinking it the way Dean did, strong and black, but he couldn't stand the taste of it that way and preferred the teeth-rotting, almost candy versions. "Coffee and a phone number," he said. He wouldn't have time to act on the phone number, but it was nice to have.

"All right, come on Casanova. We've got to get back and start digging through that research." Dean tugged at his collar a little, loosening the tie. Ben couldn't blame him. It was unbelievably hot out here and he was planning on stripping out of his jeans and dress shirt as soon as Dean would let him.

xxx

Sam turned to look at the back of the funeral home when the commotion started. He felt a chill race across his body when he saw his brother there, and in its wake there was a horrible pins-and-needles feeling of numbness. Then he watched his brother stumble into a flower arrangement and all of that was swept away by the rage.

He handed Peter off to his mother-in-law and made a beeline for the door, snagging his brother's arm and dragging him out into the parking lot. Sam caught a quick glimpse of Bobby following behind which made him a little more angry; fucking Uncle Bobby had brought Dean to Jess' funeral while his brother was drop-down drunk.

"What are you doing here?" he hissed once they were out in the parking lot. Dean looked like hell, swaying a little in the waning sunlight with at least three days worth of stubble on his face.

Dean took a longer time than should have been necessary to focus on Sam's features. "I'm here for the funeral," he said.

"No. You don't get to do this. You've met Jess once, didn't come to the wedding, and never came to see Peter when he was born. You can't show up now, acting like this, and expect to just slide right back into my life. I don't want you here. From now on you stay away from me and my son. We don't need you here, and I don't want you here." Sam gave Bobby a glare for good measure and stalked back inside, purposefully not looking back.

Dean was not going to screw up Peter's life with all the crap that came along with being a Hunter. Sam wasn't going to let it happen.

xxx

Plumbing the depths of county records hadn't taken that long in the grand scheme of things. Sam was a tiny bit impressed by how quickly it had gone. Ben made a beeline for the bathroom as soon as they got back, coming back in a T-shirt and shorts. Dean didn't even bother with the bathroom, swapping out his suit with jeans and worn cotton where he stood in the living room. They reconvened at Sam's kitchen table once Sam had changed, pooling all the information they'd gathered separately and beginning a renewed search for patterns. Searching for a spirit like this was more difficult because it wasn't tied to one specific location or family, and Sam became more on edge the longer it dragged out. Dean talked him into taking a rest after two hours of research, but it was short and fitful and plagued with nightmares. Every time he closed his eyes he saw Peter's frightened face, those big eyes that he'd gotten from Jessica taking up half of his face. Oddly enough, that was preferable to the one hastily aborted dream where he buried Peter next to Jessica. Dean woke him up from that one, his expression oddly sympathetic. It made Sam wonder what he had let slip while he slept.

"I think we've got a lead," he said, heading back to the kitchen table. It was barely recognizable as such right now, littered with papers and books and crowded with two different laptops. "Looks like most of this town was built on an old cattle ranch. The owner couldn't make a go of it, so he sold out in the 1880's and moved back east."

"Any kids?"

"Wife died in childbirth to their one daughter, who died when she was six. Cause of death wasn't listed."

Sam thought about that for a second. Dead mother, no brothers or sisters to play with, and no neighbors to make friends with either: it sounded close to the parameters that Dean had set. A lonely kid that died young. "That sounds promising. If the whole town used to be her home, she could pretty much go anywhere she wanted."

"And the family had their own burial plot near the house, since there wasn't exactly a town back then. You up for a visit?"

They took the Impala, of course. It would have been too much trouble to transfer everything they needed to Sam's car, and the Mazda wasn't really built to handle the rough trails that they would need to travel on to get to their destination. The original house was still standing, although you could tack on the word 'barely' without any stretching. Sam had been to a hundred places like this when he was a kid, either squatting with his dad and Dean or trying to pin down something that needed to be taken out Dean had broken his leg in a house like this when they were both teenagers, tossed by a spirit while their father burned the bones twelve miles away. It was a little disturbing how easily he'd slipped back into this life.

Dean propped open the false bottom of the trunk, setting off a series of even less pleasant memories. He hadn't handled a weapon in years, though he still had a gun tucked away in a lockbox in his apartment. Ben treated the things inside with the kind of cautious respect of someone who had been trained very well but hadn't actually had to use them in the field somewhere. "Here, Sam," Dean said, turning around and handing him a sawed-off shotgun. "I figure you're pretty rusty. You should be all right with this."

"The ghost isn't going to be bothered by buckshot," Sam protested.

"It's rock salt in the shells. Something I came up with when I needed something a little more portable than a salt line. It's kind of caught on with other Hunters now. Bobby told everyone."

"That should work," Sam said, accepting the weapon. He filled his pockets with extra shells, making sure he could access them easily.

Ben was given a shovel, which he accepted with a roll of his eyes, and Dean took a second shovel and a duffel bag that Sam knew probably contained lighter fluid, salt and a second shotgun. He passed the duffel over to Ben and pulled out a third shotgun, checking to see if it was loaded before looking back up at Sam. "All right. Sam, you head into the house looking for any sign of Peter. We're going to find the grave and get started."

"What if it's not this one?"

"Then it's back to square one. But I've got a feeling about this one. I think Elizabeth borrowed Peter so she'd have someone to play ring around the rosey. Call when you find him." Dean headed around the porch with his son, walking towards the back of the house, and Sam swallowed, made sure the shotgun was loaded, and stepped through the door.

The floorboards creaked with each step, and he had to place every foot very precisely because some of them were clearly rotted. The inside of the house was almost unnaturally still and was almost ten degrees cooler than the bright sunshine of the yard. His eyes adjusted to the gloom quickly and Sam went through each room on the first floor with caution, checking every spot that might be small enough for his son to be hidden.

He found the first body in the kitchen, tucked away into a cupboard like the child had fallen asleep while playing hide and seek. This one was mostly skeletonized. The next one was not. His experience let him ballpark the small corpse in the linen closet as somewhere around a year old, though he was sure an actual professional could tell more. The third one was lying on a rotted mattress upstairs and was somewhere between the other two.

Every fatherly instinct that Sam now possessed was screaming at him, had been screaming since the first body he'd discovered. He had a sudden, shocking appreciation for John Winchester and why he'd always been so angry. It was hard to keep up his methodical search for his son when the clock was obviously ticking away. Only the knowledge that he would be wasting time running around in a blind panic kept Sam from doing just that.

There were two more skeletons upstairs, one hidden away in a toy chest and the last piled on the floor of an old wardrobe, but no trace of Peter. The way the bones were hidden made Sam think that they had all died of thirst or starvation, like the children they had once been had curled up and gone to sleep and just never woken up. They almost looked like discarded toys that a small child had dropped when they grew bored.

With the first two floors cleared, Sam was beginning to feel the icy grip of panic. The only place left to search in the house was the storm cellar, and given the way Elizabeth had been playing with the other children he didn't think it was likely that they would be down there in the dark.

Sam headed out of the house after ten more minutes of searching. There was no trace of Peter anywhere inside, and he was now well past the point of complete and utter terror. Dean and Ben had made excellent progress on Elizabeth's grave, though they hadn't gotten there completely. "He's not in the house."

"Damn it," Dean cursed, looking up from his grave-digging. "Do we have the right spirit?"

"There's five other corpses inside, so I'd say yes," Sam told him. "We probably ought to just burn the whole place down once we've found Peter." He hated to think of the parents of these children never knowing what happened, but this was a recipe for a really nasty haunting. Just add time for the spirits of those dead kids to become angry and watch the deaths occur.

"All right," Dean said, returning to his work with a grunt. "You two split up and search the outbuildings. Maybe there's one that she likes to use as a playhouse." He looked up at Ben once the teenager had scrambled out of the grave. "Be careful, Ben. Take the EMF meter and the shotgun."

A small part of Sam was impressed by the way the boy avoided rolling his eyes. Sam would have done so if he hadn't been so worried about finding Peter. "I'll take the barn," he said, and Ben nodded in agreement.

"Dibs on the tool shed." Ben rummaged through the duffel bag and pulled out something that looked like Frankenstein's walkman and the third shotgun. Sam watched as the teenager double-checked to make sure that the weapon was loaded before hurrying toward the building.

The barn was slightly colder than the house had been which was a good sign if you were actively looking for a ghost. Sam felt hope mixed with wariness. His son was here. He could feel it in his bones.

There was a rustling in the hayloft as he was checking the third empty stall. It was the first noise he had heard that wasn't created by the three of them since they'd arrived. "Peter?" he called. There was no sense in being too stealthy. The ghost knew he was here.

The rustling started again, joined by a childish giggle. Sam stiffened and brought the shotgun up to bear, thankful that Dean had come up with the idea of salt-filled shotgun shells. If Peter was there, the salt would be non-lethal. Though the thought that it would also probably hurt made his heart clench a little. "Its Dad, kiddo. You in here?"

He caught the flicker out of the corner of his eye as the form of a little girl appeared beside him. "You can't have him," she said petulantly. "I need someone to play with. We're going to play together forever. Besides, he doesn't want to go with you."

"But he needs to," Sam pointed out. He hoped Dean hurried with the grave. Trying to talk sense into a spirit was a dicey proposition at best. He'd managed to do it once, back when he was in high school, but their father never had. It was why Hunters tended to just default to a salt and burn. If a spirit managed to catch the attention of a Hunter, it was usually because they'd already gone round the bend. "The same thing that happened to the others will happen to him. He needs food and water and rest."

She pouted and twined her fingers on the hem of her shirt. She was dressed like a boy, her clothing dirty and stained and her hair pulled back into a messy braid. Sam was a little surprised that she had managed to manifest at all, since the sun was only starting to set. It added an extra degree of danger to the whole situation. Elizabeth was much stronger than she appeared. "But I'm bored," she said, her voice a grating whine that was a little scarier than it should be. "None of them ever stay and keep me company. They always go away."

There was a chance they would be coming back, Sam knew. At least five children in the house, who knew how many more, all forced to play with the spirit of this little girl until they dropped dead. "Maybe you should try going away, too," he said. "Didn't you ever get the chance to move on?"

Elizabeth's expression was sulky. "I didn't want to," she said. "It looked boring."

Sam had been a father long enough to interpret that as something else entirely. "You were scared," he said, careful to keep his voice gentle. "That's all right. People get scared sometimes."

"I wasn't scared," she said, voice filled with bravado. "I just didn't want to go without my dad. I didn't want to leave him. And then he went away. He left me here."

"I'm sure he didn't want to," Sam said, trying to stay calm and soothing while his heart raced and he mentally urged his brother to _hurry the hell up_ with that grave. Children were hard to reason with as it was, and spirits were always so much more single-minded. "I would never want to leave Peter."

"He left me," she said, the tone of her voice far more angry now. "He left me all alone."

The hair on Sam's arms and on the back of his neck stood up straight. This would probably be a good time to use the shotgun in his hands, but if he did he lost any chance of reasoning with the ghost. "He's probably waiting for you right now," he tried.

The form of the little girl glared up at him and Sam felt himself being pushed hard, shoved away. She flickered for a second and returned to seeming solidity. "Go away! I don't want you here!"

"Stop it!"

Sam looked up into the hayloft to see his son's tired, somewhat petulant face. "You leave my Daddy alone," he said.

"He's trying to take you away," the ghost said, looking like she was about to cry. It was all smoke and mirrors and manipulation, of course, and even Peter seemed to realize it.

"I want my daddy," he said, with all the crankiness an overly tired child could muster. Sam knew that it amounted to quite a bit. "I want to go home!"

"And I want to play," she shot back, stomping a foot. Rotting horse tackle and the few pieces of rusted, broken equipment rattled from their scattered positions.

Sam mentally pleaded with his brother to hurry. There would be no talking this one down. He had spent enough time with spoiled, angry children while shuttling Peter to his different classes over the years to know. Time to stall and hope Dean got to the bones before Elizabeth killed him or Peter, or possibly both.

The ghost seemed to be unable to decide which of the Winchesters she was going after. Sam decided to make it easier for her. "Too bad. I'm pretty sure what you need is a spanking. You're a spoiled brat and you need to stop hurting other kids."

The expression on the ghost's face was pretty much a mask of complete rage. Apparently no one had told her what to do in a very long time. Sam had just enough time to bring the shotgun up to bear, shoot, and duck out of the way of a broken, rusted saw blade.

The salt rounds worked as promised, dissolving the apparition with a scream. Sam hoped it was painful. "Peter, come down. Hurry!"

"No!" Elizabeth rematerialized and made a grab for Sam. He returned the favor with a second blast from the shotgun. He realized his mistake almost immediately and fumbled to reload. It had been a very long time since he'd handled a shotgun.

The ghost was faster. "You can't have him," she screamed and Sam felt himself be shoved away and into the wall of the barn. The structure groaned ominously, the beams of the hayloft creaking.

"Peter, get out of the hayloft!" Sam finished reloading the shells into the shotgun and blasted the ghost again. He saw Peter's blond head, a shade or two darker than the rotting hay, as his son stepped onto the ladder. His heart was hammering in his chest as he watched Peter make his careful way down the old ladder. They had to get out of this barn. The whole place was a death trap, a weapon that the ghost could use to take them both out of the picture if it chose.

Elizabeth reappeared by the ladder up in the hayloft, and Sam took aim and fired once more. He'd learned from last time and had the shells ready to go, hurrying to reload as soon as he had fired. Peter picked up his pace on the ladder, moving more quickly, and was on the ground and at Sam's side before the ghost came after him again. There was fear on his small face now, but Sam didn't have time to comfort him or contemplate the loss of his child's innocence. He shot the ghost again and made a hasty retreat out of the old barn.

The structure shuddered as they crossed outside into the twilight. Sam kept moving away, shotgun held ready while Peter clung to his free hand. He had a feeling it was about to come down on top of them. There was a loud crashing sound, probably a beam giving way inside, and Sam heard a high-pitched, pained scream before everything abruptly went still.

His cell rang thirty seconds later, and Sam was forced to let go of Peter's hand to answer it. He was understandably reluctant to release his hold on the shotgun.

"You got him?" Dean asked, not bothering with preamble. "The bones are toast."

"Yeah, I've got him. It's safe?"

"Should be. I'll call Ben and we'll tend the fire a little bit longer, make sure the bones are broken down to dust. You go ahead and take Pete to the car, get him some food and water. There's granola bars in the backseat."

Sam was too relieved to have his son back safe in his arms to rib on his brother's food choices. Apparently having a steady girlfriend had resulted in the impossible and made Dean give up on the junk food. "Bottled water in the trunk?"

"Yeah, there's a flat of it. Go ahead, we'll take care of this now and fill in the grave afterwards before we call the cops and leave an anonymous tip."

"You don't want to burn the bones?"

"I'm sure those kids will all be cremated once the coroner is done with them. That tends to make it harder for ghosts to stick around, and if they weren't upset enough to manifest now they probably won't." Dean fumbled his phone a little on his end. "Having your kid disappear on you is its own special hell. Someone missed them and will want some kind of closure. I'm calling Ben back to help me with the grave. Take care of your kid, Sammy. We'll finish up here and meet you there in a half hour."

Peter was disturbingly quiet and pliant in his arms as he Sam hefted him up and carried him to the Impala. He hoped it was merely exhaustion, hunger, and thirst that made him this way. If the ghost had managed to leave some sort of taint behind even after they had burned the bones it would be almost impossible to break.

His son drank obediently when Sam gave him a bottle of water, his blue eyes shadowed as his gaze darted around the rotting farmhouse that was slowly being overcome by the dark. "I want to go home," Peter croaked, and Sam pulled him in closer. The boy was getting a little too old for such displays of affection, at the ripe age of seven, and the fact that he not only allowed the hug but clung a little more tightly was evidence of how horrible the experience had been.

"We're going soon, I promise," Sam said. "We have to wait. I had someone here to help find you, and we have to wait for him."

It was completely dark by the time Dean and Ben came back to the car. They'd cleaned up a little, which Sam appreciated. He remembered how bad a grave could smell, even one this old. The creak of the trunk opening and the clunk of the equipment being put away stirred Peter out of his shallow sleep. His son twitched and flinched at the unexpected sounds, but unexpectedly settled once Dean got into the driver's seat and started the engine.

"Ready to go home?" Dean asked, glancing at Sam in the rearview, and Sam felt a rush of gratitude for his brother and his blunt, straightforward attitude. Peter was looking more comfortable and more relaxed than he had since Sam had found him, and Dean was at least partially responsible for that.

"We're ready, Dean."

Part Three

It was one thing to remove your presence from your brother's life by choice, Dean reflected. It was something entirely different when your brother forcibly kicked you out and blockaded the door to prevent any sort of reunion. He had always planned to go back once he thought Sam was ready to handle him and all the baggage that goes with a Hunter, but then months had turned into a year had turned into seven years and he never went back. He kept telling himself that it was better this way, though the truth was that it was easier. If he never saw Sammy, he never had to worry about disappointing him.

Now that Sam was the one who had decided to cut all communications Dean could see how much it rankled to be on the outside of your brother's life. He had always hoped that he would have a chance to get to know Sam's son, but that would obviously have to wait until Sam had cooled down a little.

In the meantime Dean jumped into work and his family with a little more single-minded focus than before. Sam would calm down eventually. Dean knew his brother, and he knew that once he stopped hurting so much from Jessica's death Sam would make some sort of gesture that meant he was forgiven for whatever had happened at the funeral. Bobby hadn't been able to really describe it and Dean's memory of the surrounding time was patchy at best. He was just glad that Lisa and Ben hadn't been around for it. That was something that neither one of them needed.

He still checked in on his brother and his nephew every time he drove through the area, even though Sam would probably not appreciate it. It was a compulsion he couldn't ignore, the need to see his brother with his own eyes and to make sure that Sam was happy and safe. It sometimes surprised him that nothing had come after his brother in revenge, but Sam was apparently the one Winchester who had successfully gotten out of the life.

Dean was glad to see it, even if it hurt a little to see his brother happy without him. Hopefully it wouldn't take too long for Sam to cool down and then they could be brothers again.

xxx

"Why?" It probably wasn't the only question Sam wanted to ask, but it was at the top of the list of questions that Dean had been expecting. "Why did you disappear when Dad died? What happened?"

Dean shook his head, leaning back against the couch. Ben was passed out on a sleeping bag on the floor, Peter blessedly asleep in his small bed, safe and home and alive. Dean was planning on leaving in the morning with Ben, hopefully after he finally managed a decent night's sleep. Life with Lisa spoiled him sometimes. He missed his warm, comfortable bed and the woman who was undoubtedly making use of it at this very moment. "I don't think you want the answer to that, Sammy. I'm just drunk enough to tell you right now."

"Good." Sam leaned in close, the hand holding his own drink trembling a little. "I think it's about time I found out how Dad died."

Dean had an abrupt flashback to nine-year-old Sammy, demanding to know the truth about what their father did. It dissolved quickly, leaving the older, taller version staring at him with the same eyes. "Please, Sammy. Don't make me tell you this. You don't want to know, man."

"I do, Dean. I really, really do. You just showed up at Stanford, scared the shit out of Jessica and told me he was dead, and then you disappeared. I need to know, I want to know, and I deserve to know. Tell me, Dean."

Dean set down his drink, long-buried anger and resentment flaring to life. "Fine, Sammy," he said, his voice harsh. "You want to know? I'll tell you." He stood up, unable to talk about this while sitting down. "We found the thing that killed Mom. That's what happened, Sammy. We found it and we killed it, and it took Dad down with it."

"What was it?" Sam looked uneasy, which Dean heartily agreed with. He had purposefully buried these memories underneath a mountain of good ones he'd made with Lisa and Ben, and now Sam was dredging them back up along with all the pain they inevitably brought with them.

"A demon. Real old, real powerful. Bastard had a plan," and he was not telling his brother about that. It had freaked him out entirely to find out what the yellow-eyed son of a bitch had done to his brother. "We got a hold of a gun that could kill anything and we trapped it, but it got to Dad first. The stubborn son of a bitch wanted to question the damn thing, and it ended up getting loose and doing more damage before I could put a bullet in its skull. Got Dad to the hospital, but it was too late by then. The demon damaged his heart too badly for the doctors to fix it." Dean let out a shaky breath. There was more that Sam should probably know, but he needed a break before he dove into it.

Sam was looking a little shell-shocked. Dean didn't blame him. It was a lot to take in. "How did Dad find it?"

"He was tracking omens," Dean said, a tone of admiration creeping into his voice despite the lingering anger with his father. "The thing was so old and evil that everywhere it went there were cattle deaths, electrical storms, unexplained fires, that sort of thing. Dad noticed a pattern to the omens that matched up with something he'd dug up years ago." There was more to the situation that he wasn't going in to, but those things were impossible to explain. Even Dean didn't really understand the help they had received.

"And what did you do after you told me?" Sam asked, his eyes taking on that pleading look that in the past had him giving up dates with cheerleaders to help his brother with some project or another. "I was worried, Dean. You just disappeared, wouldn't answer your cell. None of our friends heard anything at all about you."

"I got very, very drunk," Dean told him. "And then I started hunting by myself." He glanced at the couch, suddenly very tired. He didn't want to do this anymore, hadn't wanted to relive any of this shit. He wanted to sleep, and he wanted to pack up his baby and drive home with his son and collapse into his own bed and make love to Lisa. Hunting was a young man's game and he felt ancient right now, worn down and used up and ready for retirement. "I'm going to bed, Sammy. You got any more questions, you can ask them in the morning." Rest would make the feeling fade; it always did.

His brain decided that this would be a great time to replay the night his dad died, which he'd been both expecting and dreading. Sam's questions had dragged up things that were best left alone, tucked away in a forgotten corner of his mind. Even when he woke up he couldn't stop from thinking about it.

Dean still didn't know how his Dad had learned the things they had needed to track down, trap and kill the yellow-eyed demon. Well, that wasn't precisely true. He just didn't know the identity of the short guy with the brown eyes and the weird sense of humor. Dean sometimes thought he knew who the guy was, that they had met before somewhere, but when he tried to remember all he got was a headache for his troubles. The source of the information didn't matter that much. What mattered was that the intel was good.

It hadn't taken long to set up. Dad had taken a quick trip to Colorado, coming back looking stern and a little angry, but with the gun they needed. Dean had spent the time scouting out a good, secure location and tracking down the ingredients they needed for both the summoning and the trap.

One of the things Dad's mysterious contact had provided was the demon's true name. This turned out to be the key to summoning it. The key to trapping it was, of course, blood. Dean wasn't surprised; it was always blood. Dean's blood had been recommended as the better choice, and they spent some time carefully painting the new symbols that had been drilled into both of their heads.

Once that was done, Dad gave Dean the Colt. They both knew that Dean was the better shot of the two of them, and John would be busy playing bait. He'd managed to interfere with the demon's plans on more than one occasion, and was certain that the thing would go for John if given half the chance. It was a bit of a switch-up; Dean was usually the one who played bait. He had a natural talent for pissing off both people and creatures.

Then, of course, the yellow-eyed demon showed up and proceeded to wreck that carefully laid plan. He ignored John and went straight for Dean, taking the time to wrap the hands of his stolen body around Dean's neck and begin to slowly, personally strangle him. Dean had a feeling that the demon wanted him to suffer, since it could have just killed him straight away instead of toying with him.

He had no idea how his father got the demon to leave him alone or how it had ended up in the circle despite it's best efforts to avoid the trap. He did remember the taunting, though, the way Azazel mocked both of them before Dad gave the OK and Dean took the shot.

It died with a somewhat shocked expression, as if it was surprised at that outcome and had completely expected to somehow talk his way out of the situation. Dean had turned to Dad, a smile on his face, to see his father crumpled on the ground outside of the circle.

After that it was a blur of rushing to the hospital and fending off medical attention so that they would pay more attention to Dad and he could slip out and clean up. That particular effort failed when he passed out, his throat swelling shut because of the damage. He woke up on a ventilator to a doctor telling him that he would need to keep the tube in his throat for at least another day while the swelling went down a little bit more. No one would tell him about his Dad and he was quickly sedated to keep him calm and to make him stop fighting against the ventilator.

The second time he woke up, the tube was gone and he was hooked up to an oxygen cannula and a heart monitor. That was when they finally told him that Dad hadn't made it, that he'd died of major heart trauma. He overheard one doctor telling another that the patient's heart had practically exploded inside his chest, and Dean knew they were talking about his Dad. The demon had gotten one last good blow in.

He'd called Bobby Singer and checked himself out AMA, stealing his Dad's body from the morgue. They'd built a pyre on the back of Bobby's property and burned it into ash. He'd made sure that Sam knew Dad was dead. And then he'd gone to ground and spent a month falling into the bottle, trying to forget all of it. He wasn't sure exactly what had taken him to Lisa's once he'd sobered up. There had been a case in the area, but it had been flimsy at best before he stumbled on several more suspicious deaths. Like he'd gotten accustomed to doing, Dean focused on those memories to bury the pain of his father's death.

She was still unbelievably hot. That had been his first thought when he'd landed on her doorstep. Incredibly hot, and now a mom of a kid who could very easily be Dean's if he did his math correctly. And then he found out that there wasn't just one strange death, but about six. All men, all fathers. Some of them were divorced or separated from their families, but some of them had stable happy lives up until they fell off of a ladder or stumbled down a flight of stairs. The mark on the back of one mother's neck was the last clue he needed for the identity of the creatures responsible, and the red clay under a windowsill gave him a location. Lisa had invited him inside when he'd brought Ben back safe and sound. They'd sat down in the living room and had a beer together while Ben played in the other room and Lisa had asked him if this had always been what he'd done with his life. He'd told her the truth, the second time in his life he'd ever told a woman the truth, and she'd smiled and kissed him.

"Stay here for a while," Lisa said, a small smile on her face.

Dean tried to marshal up an argument against the simple phrase, paired with that smile. "I shouldn't," he finally said. "You don't need someone like me in your life."

"Why don't you let me make those decisions?" She reached up one hand, resting it on his cheek. "Is there somewhere you need to be?"

Dean shook his head. "No, but . . . ," he glanced over at Ben, playing at the kitchen table with his headphones on. "You're absolutely sure he isn't mine?"

"There was a guy back then. I had a blood test done." Lisa was studying him now, warm brown eyes practically seeing through his skin. "You don't look happy about that."

"I don't have any real family left," Dean confessed. "My mom died when I was a kid, dad died a couple of years back, and my brother . . ." he trailed off, not wanting to get i to the Sammy mess just now. "It was nice, not feeling alone." He'd been alone for a long time, unable to just stop even though they'd finally gotten the demon that killed his mom.

Lisa looked at him very carefully. "You don't have to be alone, Dean. Stay with us for a while. Ben would like to spend time with you. So would I."

He slept on the couch that first night, waking up when Lisa came down the stairs to get ready for work and thankfully managing to keep the knife under his pillow from being seen. Dean would be the first to admit that he was crap at relationships; the only serious relationship he'd had to date was with a girl who, he could now see, didn't really know anything about him. Despite this, even he was aware enough to know that he and Lisa really needed to talk about this situation. So when Lisa sat down to eat breakfast, Dean got up from the couch, started coffee, and sat down across from her.

"I'm not the greatest guy. I'm a little bit crazy and I've done some things that the cops would be very interested in if they knew about them. I swear too much, I drink too much, and I once put Nair in my brother's shampoo bottle. The longest relationship I've ever had lasted two weeks before she told me to never come back. So why would you ask me to stay?"

Lisa reached across the table and grabbed his hands, her grip strong and firm. "Because you're a good man. You saved Ben's life, which means you saved me. Ben likes you, you're good with him, and I like you too." Then she stood up, put her dishes in the sink, and kissed him on the way out of the room, discussion over.

He stayed for two weeks that first time before a hunt popped up in Chicago and he was on the road again. After a month he came back a little hesitantly, unsure whether Lisa would still want him around. It took six months of this pattern before he figured out that she understood about what he did and why he did it and that she would continue to welcome him back.

Slotting into life with Lisa and Ben was easier than he expected, in a lot of ways. Lisa was a creature of habit, despite her free-wheeling youth, and Dean could count on certain things being true whenever he made it back to their house. The lawn got mowed on Saturday mornings, unless the weather kept it from happening. Laundry was done on Sunday afternoons and Wednesday evenings, although he rarely managed to make it in time. The consistent schedule helped when he came home from hunting; he knew that on Thursdays Lisa was done teaching at noon and Ben had tae kwon do after school with two of his friends, so there was a five hour gap of alone time that they could use.

That was the thought that Dean clung to in an effort to shove the memories of his dad's death back into their little box. Him and Lisa, house to themselves for several hours. Those hours were typically one of the highlights of his week. They'd christened every room in the house except for Ben's, which they both agreed was too weird, and the basement, which had spiders. Neither one of them were fond of spiders.

He took a deep breath and released it slowly, then another, and slowly drifted back to sleep.

xxx

Life after Jessica was a little colder than he was used to, more empty without her warmth and laughter. Taking care of Peter did an admirable job of filling in the gaps, but as wonderful as his son was he couldn't fill every one. Sam had a worried feeling that this hole in his life would always be there in some form or another, and for the first time in his life he felt like he understood his father. If this was what John Winchester had felt like when Sam's mother had been killed, no wonder the man went off the deep end.

The idea gave him a little more resolve. The last thing Sam wanted was to turn into his father in any way, shape, or form. John Winchester had left his scars on Sam's life and Sam had no desire to inflict any of the same marks on Peter.

It got easier after the initial numbness and the excruciating pain had both passed by a little. Peter gave him a reason to smile and laugh again, which was probably what helped the most. His job with the firm kept him busy, and that helped as well.

What struck him the most was the fact that the pain never really went away. It was made easier with time and his son and his work, but underneath it all Jess' death still quietly ached, so constant that he became accustomed to it.

Sam did what any sane person with chronic pain would do: he set his jaw and endured. It would be better some day.

xxx

Ben managed to beat his dad when it came to waking up, for once, and he was glad he did. Petey had been too tired and strung out last night for anything fun, which Ben could understand. He still had the occasional nightmare about the cage in the basement and the thing that looked like Mrs. Piper grabbing him, still sometimes woke up to the sensation of needle-sharp teeth in the back of his neck. He knew his dad had the same kind of bad dreams every once in a while and that his mom came into his room in the middle of the night to reassure herself that Ben was alive and himself and not some creepy thing with hollow eyes and a mouthful of teeth. His cousin would eventually figure out how to live with what had happened.

This morning Petey woke up shortly after Ben and after a little bit of awkwardness they ended up in the kitchen making breakfast for when Dad and Uncle Sam woke up. Peter was a little helpless when it came to cooking, so Ben had him set the table and dig out the syrup and butter and jam while Ben pulled out a box of pancake mix and a frying pan. Dean was better at this, but Ben knew his way enough around a kitchen to make pancakes and scrambled eggs and grilled cheese and he could handle it.

His cousin was doing much better in the light of morning, answering questions that Ben asked and asking a boatload of his own. He shut up for a minute or two when Dad shuffled in, lured by the smell of food and coffee despite how unbelievably tired he probably was, but Dad got him talking again soon enough. Ben remembered being that age and meeting Dean and knowing how unbearably cool he was. Having Dean save you was just icing on the cake.

Uncle Sam came in right about the time that Dad took over the pancake duties so Ben could eat. "What are you three up to?"

"We're discussing comparative literature, Sammy," his dad said easily. "Have a seat, Ben made coffee. Coffee that he isn't allowed to have a second cup of."

Damn it, he thought he'd been sneaky enough that Dean hadn't noticed him inching toward the coffee pot. "Come on, dude, I'm seventeen."

"And you've already had one cup. You'll probably end up having another on the drive back. Don't want to stunt your growth."

Ben rolled his eyes. "I'm already taller than you, dude. I think I'm good."

"Don't you want to be taller than your Uncle Sam?" Dean grinned from his spot by the stove. He added another stack of pancakes to the plate in the middle of the table. "Eat."

It didn't take much more urging than that. Ben sat down and reached for the strawberry jam that he'd found in the cupboard, breaking the seal on the jar and spreading it liberally across a stack of pancakes. "Do you think we can stop on the way home?"

"And do what?"

Ben smiled, feeling a little sheepish. "Visit Uncle Bobby?" Out of the corner of his eye he saw an expression cross his uncle's face, there and gone in an instant. He didn't think anyone else in the room caught it; Dad was looking at him and Petey was focused on pancakes. It had disappeared so quickly that most people probably wouldn't have been able to decipher it, but Ben had spent the last ten years learning how to read a man who rarely talked about what he was feeling. Sam was hurt that they were leaving today, and even more hurt that they would be stopping to see Bobby just to visit.

He didn't really like his newly introduced uncle that much. Sam had a habit of talking down to his dad like Dean was stupid, and while Dean might not get bent out of shape about it Ben totally reserved the right to get pissed off. Dean was one of the smartest people that Ben knew, even if he'd never gone to college, and no one should be allowed to talk to him like that. Besides, Sam was rude and demanding and he'd talked down to Ben like he was some little kid. Uncle Bobby was clearly the superior uncle in this situation.

Except . . .Dean loved Sam. Ben could see it pretty clearly, since anyone else in the world would probably have been laid out flat at the first snide comment. He was enjoying being around his brother, and Sam wanted to spend more time with him.

Damn it.

He rethought his plan. As much as he was enjoying his cousin, who had turned out to be a pretty cool kid even if he was a little quiet, Ben had wanted to leave today. Job done (successfully, 'cause he and Dean were an awesome team), time to head out. He'd only suggested visiting Bobby because he loved the man's house and rarely got to go. Bobby tended to come to them when he visited, probably so he wouldn't have to clean. He wanted to leave Colorado in the rearview mirror, and Dean would probably oblige him if he kept his mouth shut.

But Dean wanted to stay with his brother. Not forever, but just for a little while longer. Ben could read his dad by now, even when the man tried to hide his feelings away like he was doing now. He cleared his throat and prepared to do something nice for Dean. He did kind of owe the guy for taking him along on this hunt. "Actually, I think I need to teach Petey how to plan a water balloon raid on the girls next door." He grinned at his dad, lifting his eyebrows in an expression that he hoped the man wasn't too distracted to read. Dad could usually read him better than anyone else, but his Uncle Sam was a really, really tall distraction.

Ben saw the moment Dean caught on to what he was really saying, able to pick out the gratitude in his father's eyes before the man turned his attention to the lawyer sitting at the table. "Yeah, Sammy," he drawled out, green eyes shining. "What do you say? Every kid should known how to plan and execute a water balloon attack."

Sam looked a little confused, but he went with it, probably swept up in the force of Dean's personality. "As long as you don't bomb Mrs. Hunt downstairs," he allowed.

"How long do you think you'll need to teach him?" Dean asked.

"Do you think we can leave tomorrow morning?" He'd be scrambling to keep Petey distracted for that long. His newly-minted cousin was very quick on the uptake.

"All right then. We'll leave after breakfast tomorrow." Dean smiled again, that weird, fond quirk that he usually only bestowed on Ben. "Be sure and call Bobby sometime today to let him know we'll be stopping by."

"Awesome!" He hadn't been expecting that. Dean really wanted to get home.

"Besides, I'm sure Petey here would love to show you his tae kwon do. Ben's been taking classes since he was a kid," he told the boy with a conspiratorial wink.

"My name is Peter," the boy muttered darkly, and Dean's smile inexplicably widened.

"So it is, kiddo."

Sam rolled his eyes and huffed out a laugh. "Your Uncle Dean is always going to all you by a nickname," he told Petey. "Probably Ben will, too. Just go ahead and enjoy it, kiddo."

xxx

The first time he noticed the grey hair Dean had a minor meltdown over it and what it meant. Lisa had been the only one to see it, but that didn't make the fact any less embarrassing.

The grey hair took him by surprise. Dean didn't tend to spend much time in front of a mirror beyond a quick glance to make sure he hadn't missed anything shaving and that his tie was straight when he needed to interact with law enforcement. He was only thirty-four, for heaven's sake, way too young for grey hair, but there it was, glaring at him. There were lines on his face now, faint ones around his eyes and mouth and on his forehead. His hands ached in the cold, years of broken fingers from thrown punches coming back to haunt him, and if he hadn't added running with Ben to his PT schedule, he would probably have needed to worry about middle-aged spread.

It was a little disconcerting considering Dean had never expected to live to thirty. Now here he was, actually looking at the possibility of thirty-five and forty and maybe even more. He had a kid and a steady girlfriend and a home to come back to when a hunt was over, all things he would have thought impossible ten years ago. It wasn't exactly some sort of rosy fantasy, but it suited him. He could have Ben and Lisa, and he could have the work he had been trained for his entire life.

He couldn't have Sammy, but that was something else entirely, something he wasn't going to think about. Sam would come around someday. Dean's younger brother was almost exactly like their father, and while John's temper might burn long and hot, eventually all of the bad things would burn away. He just had to be patient.

xxx

Ben was one sneaky kid. Dean picked up on his son's plan to give him time with Sam from the beginning, but he wasn't sure that Sam had noticed. It had been a long time since he'd been around anyone that devious. Then again, Sam had been just as tricky when he was a kid. He would probably never know for sure.

Of course, with Ben watching out for Petey and keeping him occupied and not thinking about the events of the past two days, he might have the chance to find out. Sam had always had a problem keeping a secret when alcohol was involved.

First he would have to get through Sam's interrogation, though, and that would be the tricky part. Sam had become a lawyer for a reason, after all.

"How did you end up staying in one place?" Sam asked, his eyes on his brother's face. "You always hated it when we were kids."

Dean smiled, remembering. "Lisa offered."

"That's it?" Sam sounded a little put out by that. "You stayed for ten years with the same woman because she said you could?"

"She's the only one who ever has, once the hunting came into the picture. I had a girlfriend before her. Cassie. When I told her what I did for a living, she broke up with me and basically kicked me out the door."

"And you still told Lisa?"

"No. She kind of found out. There was a nest of changelings in her neighborhood that were swapping out the kids with creepy little Stepford vampires. That's why Ben knows so much about them. I found the kids, torched the mama changeling, and brought them all back home."

"And you still hunt." It obviously made no sense to Sam, who had been compartmentalizing for most of his life. Hunting didn't fit into normal, happy life, according to Dean's little brother. Dean doubted that he'd be able to convince Sam otherwise in the little time they had.

"I'm gone for a couple weeks at a time. I do odd jobs around the neighborhood when I'm home, work under the table at a local garage, that kind of thing. It's not perfect, but it works for us." It had been damned hard to adjust at the beginning, but now they had something of a routine that worked for all of them.

"All right, that's good to know," Sam said. There was a somewhat comfortable silence as they eyed each other. Dean had been reminded of just how similar the two of them could be over the last few days, and also of how different. In some ways it was like being around his dad again, because for all of their arguing and posturing Sam and John Winchester were always far more alike than either one of them liked to admit. Sam took a deep breath, let it out slowly. "What happened at Jess' funeral?"

"I don't know, man." He held up his hand to forestall the inevitable protest. "I'm not messing around with you or avoiding the question. I honestly don't remember. I had a doozy of a concussion and a possible skull fracture that the first doctor didn't see and I have this major gap in my memory." It wasn't strictly true. Dean remembered flashes of the funeral and Sam's anger, but telling his brother that wouldn't give them the kind of reunion that they were both trying for now. It was best to just let that particular wound heal rather than to poke it anymore. Dean had figured out a long time ago what Sam had thought was taking place and knew that his brother hadn't meant anything by the harsh words. Sam was too much like their father sometimes, and John had always had this tendency to act and speak without thinking when it wasn't about the hunt.

He grinned at Sam, feeling the slight pull of the scar as he did so. "Enough about me, Sam. Tell me about your kid."

Sam glanced over into the next room, a fond expression that made him look like their father crossing his face as he looked at his son. "He's everything."

Dean could understand that completely.

xxx

Dean and Ben hit the road incredibly early the next morning, by his standards: the sun was just starting to lighten the horizon a little and the streets were practically empty. Sam and Peter came down to see them off, the two of them standing on the sidewalk while Dean started up the Impala.

He took a second to enjoy the smooth rumble of the engine, something he tried to do as often as possible. It was one of the few constants from his old life, tied irrevocably into his current one. He glanced through the car window at his brother, actually smiling at the two of them as he pulled away from the curb. Sam had one long arm wrapped around Pete's shoulders and the two of them were waving when Dean took one final look in the rearview mirror.

Then they turned the corner and Sam and Pete were gone from sight. Dean shifted in his seat, grinned at his son in the passenger seat, and pointed the car towards home.

They'd been gone too long.


End file.
